Paris matters here less as a setting for a continuous story than as a place through which the book tests the difference between perception and imagination. Its rooms and streets are treated as real locations, yet they also reappear in images, memories, and a novel’s accumulating world. The city makes a central distinction concrete: an imagined Paris is not a second, unreal city that replaces the real one. Rather, real people and places can be intended through an image that presents them as absent, while a reader can build a place beyond what any single sentence states.

Real rooms and displaced presence

Paris enters most directly through Pierre’s room. The account contrasts the Pierre who is currently in Berlin with an image that presents him at home, seated in a familiar chair in his room in Paris. That mismatch raises a problem about what the image is of: the living Pierre in Berlin, or the Pierre who lived in Paris the previous year. The location is not incidental scenery. It makes visible the gap between the person intended and the version through which he appears.

A later account gives the discrepancy a more precise explanation. The knowledge directed toward Pierre may identify him as he is now, while the image’s representative medium supplies a different appearance: Pierre in a blue overcoat on the Place du Châtelet, rather than in a dressing gown at breakfast. The image can present the overcoated figure as the same Pierre. Paris thus provides a recognizable setting for an appearance that does not match the person’s current circumstances. The conflict is not resolved by imagining two Pierres; it arises because the image’s identifying intention and the appearance it uses do not coincide in time or dress.

Another passage insists that the person and his room remain real even when he is imagined. Pierre is described as living in a real room in Paris, while the person imagining him is elsewhere. When Pierre appears in the image, he does not appear in the writer’s room; he appears as the person who is in his own room. The image’s defining feature is therefore not that Pierre has become unreal, but that he is absent from the place where the imagining occurs. Paris remains real, and the Pierre aimed at remains the one real person; what changes is how his presence is given to consciousness.

Streets and buildings in imagined worlds

Paris also helps explain how reading exceeds the bare meaning of words. In the novel example, the sentence that someone entered Pierre’s office becomes a point of departure for further understanding. A later reference to someone leaving and slamming the door is localized in that office; knowledge from earlier chapters places the office on the third floor of a new building in the suburbs of Paris. The sentence itself does not contain all those details. The reader carries them forward and treats the office, floor, building, and surrounding district as connected features of a world.

That connection is not merely a chain of verbal definitions. The reader apprehends the office as something in a building, and the building as something situated on Emile-Zola Street. In this account, the place acquires depth through relations among things: an office belongs inside a building, and the building belongs in a street and district. Paris is therefore both named location and part of the larger spatial structure that reading supplies. The city’s fictional presence is not reducible to the phrase that mentions it; it is assembled through the reader’s knowledge of the narrative and the relations that knowledge sustains.

The contrast between a report and a novel clarifies the effect. The same general idea of a building can be approached as a rule or category, or as a particular thing through which a person moves. In the novel, the building and its floors are taken as parts of an objective world. Paris helps anchor that world, but the account does not claim that every feature of it is spelled out in the text. Instead, the reader localizes the narrated action by drawing on what has already been established.

Paris across images and recollection

The city also appears in an example of facial contamination: an image that seems to be one face turns out to combine, in an undifferentiated way, the face of a bank employee seen the previous day and that of a police officer regularly seen at a crossroads. The passage then gives a parallel example involving buildings. An image intended to evoke a red stone building in Saint-Etienne proves to be valid for two buildings at once: that stone building and a brick building in Paris. Paris here is not simply a clear picture reproduced in the mind. It is one source within an image whose identity is mixed with another source.

These examples distinguish the image from ordinary perception. A perceived object can be examined among its details; an image may instead hold together features that would not belong to one determinate object in perception. Paris’s brick building can coexist in the image with the building in Saint-Etienne without the image clearly separating them. The city thus participates in a case of imaginative overlap, not in a claim that the two actual buildings are the same.

Paris is also part of the distinction between memory and imagination. To recall Pierre’s handshake from the previous evening is, in this account, to direct consciousness toward a real past event. To imagine Pierre as he exists now in Berlin is different: that person is intended as out of reach, rather than retrieved as a past occurrence. The Paris room and Rue d’Ulm belong to discussions of Pierre’s real location and of the appearances through which he is imagined; they do not make the image itself a memory. The city’s recurring role is to keep those categories apart even when the same person, room, or street appears across them.

Significance

Across these examples, Paris links physical location to the limits and activity of representation. A real room can be the setting in which Pierre lives and, at the same time, the absent place through which he appears in an image. A street and building can be inferred from a novel’s unfolding details, while a Paris building can enter an image combined with one in another city. These are distinct uses of the city, not parts of a single plotted journey.

The resulting account resists treating an image as a weaker but otherwise equivalent perception. A place in an image may be incomplete, displaced, or mixed with another appearance; a place in a novel may extend beyond the sentence that first identifies it. Paris is significant because these examples make the difference legible: the real city does not cease to exist when it is imagined, but the way it is present to consciousness changes with the act of imagining, remembering, or reading.